Prefocus, use a tripod and camera flash and a wireless flash down off to the right and you could have nailed it. Take a look at O. WInston Link's railroad photos. He used a ton of lights to photograph this train under a full head of steam.

Thanks for that link.

I don't think that I'll buy and/or carry all of that apparatus around!

Phenomenal Photograph (at the wiki link above) Takes us old f@rts back a bit. Those were the days.

Tom

Indeed. I had the fortune to know Winston personally, a very gentle man. In regards to the photos, on average he took 2 days to set up the scene and lighting for the photograph, plus the darkroom work (which is where I got to know him, he used the shop I managed to do some print processing).

If you expect to get results from a moving train...then, reading the prior replies, a tripod on this shoot is an absolute MUST. Frankly, if you *really* want to get this shot without doing a "Winston" (200 light bubls set around the scene), you'd better expect an HDR with one for background and one for the freeze-motion of the train exclusively. There is way too much dynamic range to ever expect to get a single shot that includes both the lights, well exposed, and some feeling of the ambient conditions around the train. Not going to happen.